Intersecting Tangents

Many conversations and overheard comments create tangents, which are often incredibly inaccurate. I hit this all the time as much of the english I use is Malaysian/Chinese English, western suburbs Melbourne english or upper murray english. Randomly spread of course. But I live in Sydney.

2009-03-14

Typically Australians talk about traditional and modern in the terms of moral values. Modern is seen as being more liberal, traditional more conservative. I think that all of these are an abuse of the term. There have been times and civilisations where being say, sexually promiscuous would be the norm, long before the Victorian era of foolish moral values. And I think that people who look back at those times as being something wonderful are some of the ones you should accuse of seeing the world through rose coloured glasses.

When I talk of a place being modern, being an engineer, I mean that it is technologically and socially developed compared to earlier eras and times. A modern world is one where scientific rather than mystical endeavours are at the fore and technology well developed. I agree that this is quite a moving target. I also have quite a lot to say about mysticism as practised by all religions but I will talk more on that later.

2008-12-30

2008-10-26

In Electrical and Electronic engineering the term master and slave is often used in conjunction with circuit design. It is a favourite design pattern, a master, say a computer, controls a bunch of slaves, say a bunch of monitoring devices. The master might poll each device in turn and the slaves would respond with whatever data they are collecting.

In a technology I work in, Frame Relay, the calling end of the telecommunication data circuit is called the master and the called end the slave, using this same thought process. In a similar vane, for backup purposes you can have two slaves, a slave with backup and a backup slave. In fact, you can have a whole series of backup slaves. This is used say when you have one remote terminal trying to connect to two redundant data centres. You would connect to one, and if that one was down, then you would connect to the other.

So it has nothing to do with whips and chains if you hear me talking of masters and slaves. Though I would be amused if you did think of whips and chains.

2008-08-16

Quite some time ago, I decided to try out a housing agency. (Melbourne in the late 1980s.) I had no experience of one. So I paid my $50 and filled in the various forms. They suggested a house in Collingwood. The men, I am guessing were gay, though I do not think that this was an issue at the time. I decided I did not like the house itself for a few reasons, it was very cold, as old terraces sometimes are, but mostly because it smelled of mildew. I think it had a major rising damp problem. When the woman asked why I did not like the house, I said that it was because it was smelly. I am guessing that this is the source of this strange story.

After that there were stories that I did not like gay people. Which at first I just ignored as it was plainly wrong. But they persisted for quite some time.

When I came back to Melbourne in 1992, a man in a pub on Exhibition Street and a Telstra employee, made a big deal once of smelling the seat of a woman who had just left.

Fast forward. When I arrived in Sydney in 1997, people made all sorts of comments about not liking smelly people. At first I just thought that this was some bizarre way the people in Sydney think. There are plenty of others, but then I have never really fitted into Australia. Though that is another story. People would say thinks like, we disliked so and so because he was smelly. Even my sister joined in on the act. She thinks that people in the CES who were queuing were a problem because they were smelly. Even last week, someone said, I (that is the person speaking) am ok, I am not smelly.

So, what these people (that is people who are not me) think by smelly and what I think by smelly are not the same think and I am very dismayed at the mountain that people have made out of a mole hill. But I have to say that it is typical of this line of thought and this is not the only thing that falls into this category.

As I said some years back, take what they say and know it is wrong. Take the opposite of what they say and know that it is also wrong. I do not like or dislike people because they are smelly, though I would object if someone had not been having a shower. The smelliest people I ever met were some hitch hikers on the south island of NZ. They had been hiking for a week and I gave them a lift back to a near by town. They had not had a shower in a week. They reeked. But it was not offensive, just a bit overpowering.

2008-08-09

HSSI is pronounced hissy, this is a type of interface used in data communications. It stands for High Speed Serial Interface. It was never common, and is becoming less so. We used to have some in our network and you would hear me on the mobile phone talking about HSSI connections. Of course it is hard sometimes not to make a linkage with a hissy fit.